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While working in core Java application or enterprise web application there is always a need of working with passwords in order to authenticate user. Passwords are very sensitive information like Social Security Number(SSN) and if you are working with real human data like in online banking portal or online health portal its important to follow best practices to deal with passwords or Social security numbers. here I will list down some of the points I learned and take care while doing authentication and authorization or working with password. I recommend to read more on this topic and have a checklist of things based on your application requirement. Anyway here are few points which make sense to me:

ThreadLocal in Java is another way to achieve thread-safety apart from writing immutable classes. If you have been writing multi-threaded or concurrent code in Java then you must be familiar with cost of synchronization or locking which can greatly affect Scalability of application, but there is no choice other than synchronize if you are sharing objects between multiple threads. ThreadLocal in Java is a different way to achieve thread-safety, it doesn't address synchronization requirement, instead it eliminates sharing by providing explicitly copy of Object to each thread. Since Object is no more shared there is no requirement of Synchronization which can improve scalability and performance of application. In this Java ThreadLocal tutorial we will see important points about ThreadLocal in Java, when to use ThreadLocal in Java and a simple Example of ThreadLocal in Java program.

.class file in Java is core of achieving platform independence which is key feature of Java. class files are compiled form of any Java program written in byte codes. Since Java program executes inside JVM, these instructions are read by JVM and than translated into machine code for underlying platform. effectively you can run class file on any platform if you have a corresponding JVM supported for that platform. Java compilers are responsible for generating .class file and they follow class file format specified by Sun and its different based on different Java version. This article is not a detailed one focused on class file format instead it contains basic information about class files and intended to give an idea about what is a class file in Java and what are some important points related to class files.

Reflection in Java is very powerful feature and allows you to access private method and fields which is not possible by any other means in Java and because of this feature of reflection many code coverage tool, static analysis tool and Java IDE like Eclipse and Netbeans has been so helpful. In last article we have seen details about private keyword in Java and learned why we should always make fields and method private in Java. There we have mentioned that private fields and methods are only accessible in the class they are declared but with reflection you can call private method and access private fields outside the class. In this article we will see simple example of accessing private field using reflection and invoking private method using reflection in Java.

How to copy file in Java from one directory to another is common requirement, given that there is no direct method in File API for copying files from one location to another. Painful way of copying file is reading from FileInputStream and writing same data to FileOutputStream to another directory. Though this process works its pretty raw to work with and best approach is for anyone to create library for common File operation like cut, copy, paste etc. Thankfully you don't need to reinvent wheel here, there are some open source library available which allows us to copy file in Java easily from one directory to another. One of such library is Apache commons IO which contains a class called FileUtils, which provides utility method for file related operation. FileUtils.copyFile(sourceFile, targetFile) can be used to copy files in Java. This Java program copy file from one location to other using FileUtils class.

How many types of JDBC drivers in Java is a classical JDBC interview question , though I have not see this question recently but it was very popular during 2006 - 2008 period and still asked mostly on Junior programmer level interviews. There are mainly 4 types of JDBC drivers in Java, those are referred as type 1 to type 4 jdbc drivers. I agree its easy to remember them by type rather than with there actual name, Which I have yet to get in memory except plain old JDBC-ODBC bridge driver. By the way here are there full names :

This JDBC tutorial is in continuation of my earlier tutorials in JDBC like How to connect to Oracle database using JDBC and 4 tips to improve performance of JDBC applications. If you are new here and haven't read them already, Its worth looking. Anyway out of all those 4 types, JDBC-ODBC Bridge driver is most common for connecting SQL Server, MS Access and mostly on training and development. here are quick review of all these four types of JDBC drivers. Also there has been some speculation of type 5 JDBC driver, I have to yet to see it.

break and continue in Java are two essential keyword beginners needs to familiar while using loops ( for loop, while loop and do while loop). break statement in java is used to break the loop and transfers control to the line immediate outside of loop while continue is used to escape current execution and transfers control back to start of the loop. Both break and continue allows programmer to create sophisticated algorithm and looping constructs. In this java tutorial we will see example of break and continue statement in Java and some important points related to breaking the loop using label and break statement. break keyword can also be used inside switch statement to break current choice and if not used it can cause fall-through on switch. Well break is not alone on breaking switch case you can also sued throw keyword on switch case.

Bean scope in Spring framework or Spring MVC are scope for a bean managed by Spring IOC container. As we know that Spring is a framework which is based on Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control and provides bean management facilities to Java application. In Spring managed environment bean (Java Classes) are created and wired by Spring framework. Spring allows you to define how those beans will be created and scope of bean is one of those details. This Spring tutorial is next on my earlier post on Spring like how to implement LDAP authentication using Spring security and How to limit number of user session in web application, if you haven’t read them already you may find them useful.

In spring framework bean declared in ApplicationContext.xml can reside in five scopes:

Counting Semaphore in Java is a synchronizer which allows to impose a bound on resource is added in Java 5 along with other popular concurrent utilities like CountDownLatch, CyclicBarrier and Exchanger etc. Counting Semaphore in Java maintains specified number of pass or permits, In order to access a shared resource, Current Thread must acquire a permit. If permit is already exhausted by other thread than it can wait until a permit is available due to release of permit from different thread. This concurrency utility can be very useful to implement producer consumer design pattern or implement bounded pool or resources like Thread Pool, DB Connection pool etc. java.util.Semaphore class represent a Counting semaphore which is initialized with number of permits. Semaphore provides two main method acquire() and release() for getting permits and releasing permits. acquire() method blocks until permit is available. Semaphore provides both blocking method as well as unblocking method to acquire permits. This Java concurrency tutorial focus on a very simple example of Binary Semaphore and demonstrate how mutual exclusion can be achieved using Semaphore in Java.

Application server and web server in Java both are used to host Java web application. Though both application server and web server are generic terms, difference between application server and web server is a famous J2EE interview question. On Java J2EE perspective main difference between web server and application server is support of EJB. In order to run EJB or host enterprise Java application (.ear) file you need an application server like JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere or Glassfish, while you can still run your servlet and JSP or java web application (.war) file inside any web server like Tomcat or Jetty.